FIRST PIC: BUECHLER IN HATCHET

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Adam Green, director of the eagerly awaited stalker film HATCHET, gave Fango a photo and details on a key behind-the-scenes contributor who also takes an onscreen role. “John Carl Buechler not only designed HATCHET’s spectacular makeup effects, he also plays Jack Cracker, a crazy, one-eyed alligator hunter who lives in the bayou,” Green tells us. “The locals all think he’s insane because he is known to sit in his boat all night, talking to himself, yelling out obscenities and getting drunk on an extremely foul substance all the while. But at the heart of HATCHET lies an old-school slasher film, and one thing we all learned back in the day was that we should always listen to the crazy old weird guy’s warnings! Unfortunately for our cast, they don’t pay enough attention to old Jack Cracker.

“Buechler had started helping me put HATCHET together long before the financing was even in place,” Green continues. “When he read the script, he saw that I was trying to bring [the genre] all back around again, and he loved that. It was time to go back to the basics of when there was a villain to both fear and cheer for—to make a horror film that is truly entertaining. The deaths in HATCHET are so in-your-face and over-the-top that I believe John felt he was finally going to get the chance to do what ‘they’ had screwed him out of when he directed FRIDAY THE 13TH PART VII. So many of his great effects were taken out of FRIDAY VII by the powers that be, because that’s just the way it worked back then.”

Confirming the film’s old-school approach, Green says that Buechler’s work eschewed the current vogue for digitally enhanced grue. “HATCHET was an extremely challenging project because, as a horror fan, I refused to do any CGI on [killer] Victor Crowley or the death sequences—and some pretty crazy stuff happens that goes far beyond anything you ever saw them pull off in the slashers of old. Much like the other horror icons [Kane Hodder, Robert Englund, Tony Todd, etc.] who came out and put their stamp of approval on what I was trying to do, John was very proud to participate in every way he could. He is a riot in the movie.” HATCHET makes its world premiere and plays several times at this month’s Tribeca Film Festival; click here to check out HATCHET’s trailer. And if you’re on the West Coast, you can meet Green and his HATCHET cast at Fango’s Weekend of Horrors June 2-4.

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